The Source of Our Ethos: Using Evidence-Based Practices to Affect a Program-Wide Shift from “I Think” to “We Know”

Abstract: This program profile demonstrates how the first-year writing program at Oakland University has engaged contingent faculty in research, assessment, and program development over the years, employing evidence-based practices to improve individual classroom instruction and to redesign the entire first-year curriculum. The authors describe their efforts to develop an inclusive model for research and professional development, a model that seeks to empower the faculty to join disciplinary conversations about the teaching of writing. Overall, the profile contributes to existing scholarship on large college writing programs by illustrating how faculty may collaborate to develop and assess curricula, to conduct and publish research, and to build a program that shifts the conversation from what individual instructors may believe about writing instruction (“I think”) to what the department may collaboratively know about best practices (“we know”).

Not
long ago, one of our contingent first-year writing (FYW) instructors
was given an official warning for ignoring our department’s
long-standing prohibition against direct instruction in standardized
English grammar. When challenged on her pedagogical practices, this
instructor dismissed our Writing Program Administrator’s (WPA’s)
invocation of decades of research into the inefficacy of
decontextualized grammatical instruction. Despite our program-wide
focus on rhetorical instruction and evidence-based practices, this
instructor’s classroom practices were based on her opinion that
direct grammar instruction was important for her students. Cases
like this one, familiar for many WPAs, illustrate a systemic issue in
FYW that pits an instructor’s uninformed good intentions and
assumptions about writing against what research leads us to know
about what works best for students in the FYW classroom.

As
this anecdote about an “all about grammar” instructor suggests,
writing programs like ours may sometimes struggle with faculty
reliance on lore and on those “false, harmful, simplistic, and
limiting” tales (Johanek 87) about what works—“for me”—in
the writing classroom. We maintain that evidence-based practices—not
just instinct or opinion—should shape our writing program because,
“if we continue to rely on belief [...] we do no better to support
a case for” our FYW practices “than what most detractors to do
support cases against them” (Anson 11). The larger implication of
evidence-based practices, both for the field and for writing
programs, is to not fight “belief with belief” but to make
certain that what works is that which can be tested via a “culture
of research” (Anson 31-32).

In
this profile of our first-year writing program at Oakland University
(OU), we demonstrate how a program-wide emphasis on research can help
to professionalize and unite our faculty. Ultimately, we would
like to do more than have contingent instructors only acquiesce
begrudgingly to approved methods. Such acquiescence may lead to
frustration if our contingent faculty are unaware of established
research in writing studies because they either rely on lore or are
specialists from related fields (e.g., literature, linguistics) or
broadly connected fields (e.g., education) who lack a specific
background in writing pedagogy. These instructors may also rely on
generalized attitudes about writing expectations that are further
complicated by their own field’s assumptions and lore about writing
pedagogy. Such approaches may exclude process, genre theory, and
rhetoric; instead, they may assume general writing skills
instruction: the idea that writing can be taught without any specific
content and that those general writing skills effortlessly transfer
to other contexts (see Petraglia). With an increasing call for
credentialed composition faculty (see Lamos, for example), our
program’s approach focuses on the promotion of professional
development and opportunities for engagement in the field of writing
studies. Elizabeth Wardle’s 2013 program profile makes a similar
argument. In that profile, she outlines the disconnection between the
larger field’s research of best practices and the “micro-level”
of individual composition programs where faculty, often from other
disciplines and untrained in composition pedagogy, are teaching the
bulk of FYW courses. Wardle argues that in order to implement the
macro-level knowledge in the field, writing programs must offer
“sustained, scaffolded support for composition teachers from all
backgrounds,” be they contingent, full-time, or graduate student,
to help those teachers become experts in the research on teaching
writing (Wardle).

From
our perspective, it is not enough to create a standard curriculum and
expect instructors to adapt. As writing studies faculty, we must
persuade with a goal of achieving a department-wide understanding and
appreciation of current pedagogical approaches and research. Such a
shift means moving from a dependence on individual perceptions about
how to teach writing and “I think” proclamations to a reliance on
collaborative research and assessment experiences and the resulting
assertions of what “we know” about how our students learn to
write. Our approach to program development focuses on recognizing
expertise among our faculty, building on and expanding that
expertise, and promoting collaborative projects to make the most of
that expertise.

Our
approach to these issues involves two threads: faculty development
and active research in the program. For us at OU, scholarly research
and program assessment are inextricably connected and contribute
equally to curricular development. In other words, we recognize the
need for scholarly research and formal assessment to improve the
program, seeking funding to assess the program using rigorous
research protocols and building on those initial assessment projects
to develop a climate where both research and assessment are valued
and rewarded.
As we discuss in the next sections, we have engaged in extensive program
assessment and research over the last five years at OU, involving the
majority of our faculty on every level in this essential intellectual
and practical work. A focus on evidence-based practices and program
development has made it possible for our program to professionalize
contingent faculty and to demonstrate our respect for first-year
instructors as knowledge-makers within the department and within the
field. Indeed, the important step between “I think” and “we
know” is the process of identifying research questions—what we
need/want to know—and conducting local research projects that allow
us to make claims as reflective practitioners and knowledge-makers.
We view program and faculty assessment not just as a means of
providing “institutional accountability” for our work with
students (Gallagher 452), but also as a way to improve teaching and
learning within our program through a disciplinary research process
that can be leveraged for instructor buy-in and professional
development.

How We Got Here: History of the First-Year Writing Program

In 1957, Oakland University was established as a small liberal arts
college{1} that
was initially affiliated with Michigan State University. Oakland
aspired to attract faculty from Ivy League universities and to
provide local students with an exceptional and rigorous educational
experience. While the faculty had Ivy League aspirations and
expectations, the university’s student population was comprised
then, as now, of good students from local families, hard-working and
ambitious young men and women who, nevertheless, were not as prepared
for university study as their faculty had hoped and as the
university’s advanced curriculum had anticipated.

Given
this context, when OU was founded, there were no first-year writing
courses because the university’s students were expected to be adept
writers by the time they arrived on campus. However, by fall 1964,
the university established its first writing center to address
faculty complaints about student writing. And by 1965, the
university’s new general education curriculum was designed to
address student writing through the inclusion of a two-semester
seminar or “Freshman Exploratory,” a course designed to be taught
by faculty across the university, who focused the course on topics of
their own choosing to explore with like-minded students (UC
Courses 1). Writing instruction was institutionalized more
formally at OU in the early 1970s with the creation of a Department
of Learning Skills. Writing faculty formed their own Department of
Rhetoric in 1982, and this department was later combined with
programs in communication and journalism to form a third, more
powerful, departmental configuration—Rhetoric, Communication, and
Journalism or RCJ (see Andersen; Ostergaard and Giberson).
At that time, our writing program was administered by a program head who
served as the writing program administrator within the triad RCJ
department housing writing, communication, and journalism.

In 2008, reacting to developments in the field and to the improved
status of writing at Oakland—as evidenced by the creation of our
new writing center and the development of general education writing
requirements at the first-year and beyond—the dean of the College
of Arts and Sciences removed our program from RCJ. We then became an
independent Department of Writing and Rhetoric, and our BA degree in
Writing and Rhetoric was approved, providing the department with a
dual focus: first-year writing and a new major.{2}
Because of support from the college dean and the provost, we
established an administrative structure that includes more robust
participation and sharing of administrative duties among faculty.

Where We Are Now: Program Description

Demographics

Today,
OU is a doctoral research university. Located about 25 miles north of
Detroit, MI, the university has a student population of 20,000,
drawing students primarily from both impoverished and affluent local
communities. Approximately 3,000 students enroll in our first-year
writing classes every year. A majority of these students are
commuters, and most will work a minimum of 17 hours every week
(“NSSE”). Most of our students are drawn to the university
because of its reputation as a “good school,” because they can
live at home while earning their degrees, and because our tuition is
among the lowest for Michigan public universities.

Despite
the economic downturn that has hit Michigan and the rest of the
country, OU continues to grow and prosper. We have seen tremendous
growth in the number of undergraduate and graduate degrees and
programs over the last decade, with complementary growth in full-time
faculty lines across the university. In fact, our new department has
nearly doubled in size over the last six years, with the addition of
five new assistant professors. With only thirteen full-time faculty,
we have relied on our new colleagues to help us strengthen both our
writing and rhetoric major and our first-year program through new
course development, faculty development activities, and assessment.
The department also employs 39 contingent faculty who teach
first-year writing, business writing, and creative non-fiction, and
who fill a number of important roles serving on department committees
and coordinating ongoing initiatives.

Program Theories

Over
the last five years, we have revised our first-year writing program
to better aid our students in developing the rhetorical skills,
composing processes, and information literacies necessary for writing
in the 21st century. The first-year curriculum, which includes Basic
Writing, Composition I, and a required Composition II class, strives
for engaged classroom communities where our students are introduced
to rhetorical strategies for writing in process-oriented,
4-credit-hour courses.

Social
constructivist and rhetorical theories also inform our classes, which
emphasize revision, rhetorical understanding, and collaborative work,
and which require community/civic engagement, new media composing,
and writing in the academic disciplines. We expect students to
understand that they are scholars involved in academic dialogue
rather than reporters summarizing the experts. Our classes encourage
real research writing for a particular purpose/audience, where
students engage with their topics as contributors to a discussion of
key issues and ideas. We view academic research as a process of
ongoing inquiry—not simply as a matter of locating appropriate
secondary sources—and we believe that our course structure and
instruction should emphasize process at least equally with product.

Program Objectives

By the time they have completed our first-year writing courses, we
expect our students to have gained some understanding of rhetoric,
critical analysis, and discourse conventions. Our classes seek to
provide students with basic rhetorical knowledge, which includes

an appreciation of how rhetorical contexts shape reading and writing,

an understanding of a variety of rhetorical appeals and approaches,

an ability to analyze a particular writing situation rhetorically, and

an ability to put that rhetorical analysis to use by producing texts that are appropriate to and effective within that situation.

Our
students are also introduced to some critical analysis, which
requires that they

Finally,
our program introduces students to discourse conventions, helping
them to recognize how

discourse conventions may be affected by shifts from print to digital modes,

expectations about citation and source use may change from one audience to another, and

source selections, citations, and use may impact a writer’s ethos.

Because
we recognize that our classes serve academic communities beyond our
own, we teach the use of two academic styles in our first-year
writing courses. Students in Basic Writing are introduced to basic
MLA citation practices, students in Composition I compose their
papers using MLA style, and students in Composition II learn APA
style. Our rhetorical approach to teaching these academic conventions
emphasizes the epistemic values, research methods, and assumptions
about knowledge construction that are inherent in different academic
citation systems. In this way, our treatment of citation practices is
similar to our treatment of grammar: both are context-dependent
aspects of writing that require rhetorical awareness and
responsiveness to a particular situation and audience, not just a
reliance on strict rules or personal preferences. Of course, the
teaching of academic conventions goes beyond familiarizing students
with citation systems. Rhetorical understanding of citation styles
points us toward the ethos of an academic community, those guiding
beliefs, values, and attitudes of any particular community that
govern its writing practices and discipline-specific genres.

How We Empower Our Faculty: Description of the Program’s Structure

Administrators

Currently,
the first-year writing program at OU is administered by three of the
co-authors of this article: the department chair, Marshall Kitchens;
the writing program administrator (WPA), Lori Ostergaard; and the
associate writing program administrator (AWPA), D.R. Hammontree.
A First-Year Writing Committee (comprised of the WPA and AWPA, at
least one co-chair of the department’s assessment committee, the
department’s chief advisor, one other full-time faculty member, and
two contingent faculty) advises the WPA on most matters related to
course assessment, curricula, textbooks, and professional
development. The department chair also plays a key role in
administering the first-year writing program: coordinating the
various committees; managing a $200,000 annual budget for first-year
writing and the major; seeking additional funding through internal
grant proposals for technology and program development; working with
the WPA to hire, train, and schedule part-time faculty;
trouble-shooting personnel issues and student complaints; and
liaising with the dean’s office, office of the provost, and the
first-year advising center.

Full-Time Faculty

The
department is comprised of one full professor, four associate
professors, six assistant professors, and two special instructors
(full time, job-secure instructors whose primary responsibilities are
teaching and service). All of the tenured and tenure-track faculty
who have been hired within the last decade hold doctoral degrees
expressly in Composition-Rhetoric or Professional and Technical
Writing.

Special Lecturers

Most
faculty in the department, including tenured and tenure-track
faculty, teach in the first-year writing program, although every year
more than 90% of our first-year writing courses are instructed by 39
contingent faculty. Our contingent faculty are designated Special
Lecturers (SLs) by the university, and they hold various advanced
degrees in related fields, including master’s degrees in
communication, journalism, literature, and creative writing. Six of
our SLs have master’s degrees in the teaching of writing and four
have PhDs in Composition-Rhetoric. Special Lecturers teach a minimum
of four courses per year—although most of our part-time faculty
teach 3/3 or 4/4/1 loads—and they are paid more per course at OU
than at any of our neighboring universities or community colleges.
Our
newest Special Lecturers are paid $1,061 per credit hour ($4,244 per
4-credit course) and our most experienced SLs are compensated at a
rate of $1,284 per credit hour ($5,136 per 4-credit course). Thus,
our newest SLs are paid 17% more per credit hour than the national
average, and our most experienced SLs are compensated 42% more (June
and Newman). Our Special Lecturers also receive partial payments for
group health insurance (60-65% depending on years of service), up
to 65% payment for optical insurance, and 8 credits in Oakland
University tuition waivers per year.

In
an effort to further professionalize our contingent faculty and
provide opportunities for them to learn more about the field of
writing studies and the teaching of writing, beginning in 2008, we
started offering our graduate-level courses in Teaching Writing and
Teaching Writing with New Media to complement the Invitational Summer
Institute that we offer each year as part of our site of the National
Writing Project. Our SLs are invited to participate in the
Invitational Summer Institute every year, and they may earn up to 8
graduate credits for their participation. SLs may enroll for free in
up to two courses a year, which has allowed a number of our part-time
faculty to pursue PhDs in Reading and in Educational Leadership. An
impressive number of our contingent faculty have also used their
tuition waivers to enroll in our department’s graduate-level
pedagogy courses. To date, half of our SLs have completed at least
one of our program’s graduate-level courses in the teaching of
writing. Of these, 7 have completed two courses, and 4 have completed
all three. Many of our faculty have presented the research they
conducted in these classes before national audiences or expanded
their graduate course projects into more extensive research agendas
in new media composition, teaching with technology, and oral history.

As
we illustrate in the sections that follow, all of our SLs regularly
engage in professional development throughout the year and many are
also engaged in assessment, curriculum development, and research
activities within the department.

How We Respond to Institutional Pressures: Assessment as Research

When
the Writing and Rhetoric department established itself as an
independent academic unit in 2008, we faced immediate pressure from
our institution to assess our required Composition II course.
Composition II had last been assessed in 2005 by rhetoric program
faculty in the RCJ department. Unfortunately, that assessment was
based only on an indirect measure: students’ self-reported
evaluation of their learning in the course as determined by a
10-question Scantron survey attached to the existing end-of-semester
course and instructor evaluations. This procedure had been
recommended by the university’s assessment committee because there
was no funding available for the kind of labor-intensive direct
assessment of student writing that had previously been done, and
which would have necessitated paying contingent faculty to read and
rate student papers. In hindsight, bowing to this institutional
pressure was an example of what Chris Gallagher calls a “‘triage’
mentality” (32), but at the time, we were not in a position to
enact Gallagher’s principle of writing assessment as “collective
inquiry” that “promote[s] teacher leadership for assessment
within (and perhaps beyond) their programs” (36).

While
that less-than-ideal assessment was taking place, the university’s
general education program was being completely restructured, and
Composition II became the required “writing knowledge foundations”
course. Shifting from the university’s program assessment schedule
to the general education assessment schedule meant that, as a key
course in the new general education curriculum, every three years
Composition II would be due for assessment. Consequently, the general
education committee expected that a baseline assessment of
Composition II would be completed at the end of the first general
education assessment in cycle in 2008—the year that we became a new
department. Due to the limited number of full-time faculty and a
number of pressing issues for curriculum and program development that
demanded immediate attention, the scheduled assessment of Composition
II was postponed.

In 2009, we hired two new full-time faculty, co-authors Elizabeth G.
Allan and Dana Lynn Driscoll, who took on the challenge of
co-chairing the department’s assessment committee. The committee’s
first priority was to assess Composition II, which had not been
thoroughly assessed since 2003. We viewed this task not only as a
foundation for future departmental assessment of the other first-year
writing courses, but also as a baseline for eventually assessing
writing in our newly-established major. As tenure-track faculty with
expertise in qualitative and quantitative writing research methods,
the assessment co-chairs approached assessment first and foremost as
a research problem.

Following
Linda Adler-Kassner and Peggy O’Neil’s strategy that writing
assessment should be conducted using discipline-specific research
methods practiced in the field of writing studies, we developed a
research-based, mixed methods assessment protocol that involved
triangulation of several sources of data: instructors’ syllabi and
research paper assignments, students’ research papers, and
students’ responses to a reflective writing assignment that the
assessment committee designed. To analyze these materials, our
assessment committee developed several rubrics based on the goals of
the FYW program and the university’s general education program.
These assessment tools included a rubric for reflective writing, a
rubric to examine syllabi and assignments, and a rubric to examine
the quality of student writing. After the development of the rubrics,
three part-time faculty and four full-time faculty spent
two-and-a-half days norming to the rubrics and assessing student
work.

We
collected two pieces of student writing for this assessment because
we believe that “one
piece of writing—even if it is generated under the most desirable
conditions—can never serve as an indicator of overall writing
ability” (CCCC Committee). Following the recommendations of the
“NCTE-WPA White Paper on Writing Assessment in Colleges and
Universities,” we sought to assess our required course using
“multiple measures” and engaging the “multiple perspectives”
of our full-time faculty and Special Lecturers (NCTE-WPA 2). We
were especially interested to see how our students assessed their own
progress in the class, which is why we chose to assess a reflective
essay along with the research paper. In “Looking Beyond Judging and
Ranking,” William Condon describes a writing test prompt that asks
students to reflect on their own learning in the college’s
curriculum and extracurriculum. Reflective prompts, Condon suggests,
may provide “testers with a rich set of data about the learning
contexts that the test-takers describe,” and he suggests that the
value of such prompts extends beyond an assessment of the writer to
encompass an assessment of the university or program itself (145).
Our students’ reflective essays provided an additional sample of
their writing that not only contextualized their research papers but
also gave us insights into what our students valued in our
instruction and what they believed they had learned in our classes.
More importantly, these reflections illuminated what we valued as a
program and helped us to identify some much-needed changes to our
curricula and our pedagogy.{3}

This
first research-based writing assessment effort as an independent
department began to create a culture of writing program research that
has made ongoing assessment of writing courses an integral part of
the life of the department. Since this first assessment, faculty in
our department have assessed our one-credit Supervised Study writing
tutorial course, our revised Basic Writing curriculum, and a redesign
of our Composition I course. But it has taken careful planning and
communication on our part to ensure that both full-time and
contingent faculty recognize the value of assessment as a tool for
identifying evidence-based best practices. Xueli Wang and Sarah
Hurley’s recent survey of full-time and contingent instructors’
attitudes toward student learning assessment across the curriculum
suggests that “faculty autonomy” and “the desire to improve
their own teaching” are key factors in their willingness to engage
in assessment; furthermore, “faculty are more likely to be willing
to engage if assessment is viewed as a scholarly activity” (9).
With our first assessment, we anticipated that our contingent faculty
would be anxious about assessment procedures that might expose
weaknesses in our curriculum, especially because we encourage our
Composition II instructors to develop their own assignments and
course themes within the framework of departmental goals and the
general education student learning outcomes. We also knew that
getting buy-in from our instructors would require good communication.

From
the beginning, we made a deliberate effort to be transparent about
the assessment process. We held professional development meetings to
explain what we were doing and why, to answer questions, and to
address instructors’ concerns, and we included several SLs as
assessment readers, paying them a stipend for their participation. We
emphasized that our research-based assessment protocol (described
above) would protect instructors’ confidentiality by de-identifying
instructors’ materials and students’ papers, and we explained
that an accurate, detailed picture of student performance—even if
it included bad news—was crucial to our ongoing efforts to improve
our writing program. Involving our first-year writing instructors in
this research-based approach to assessment has helped us to bridge
the traditional gap between full-time and contingent faculty (as we
describe in the next section).

Our
department embraced Kathleen Blake Yancey and Brian Huot’s
philosophy that writing assessment is “as much about faculty
development—about how faculty develop and monitor their teaching
and about how their understanding of learning changes—as it is
about student development” (11). Based on our Composition II
assessment results, we identified several issues that we could
address with simple changes to our faculty handbook, such as
clarifying our departmental policies about requiring revision and
scheduling individual conferences. We then prioritized the student
learning outcomes that required more sustained intervention and
designed a series of faculty-led workshops to address those concerns
collaboratively with our first-year writing instructors. Our
investment of time and resources in this first assessment effort as
an independent department set a precedent for how we would present
ourselves to the university at large. We were able to demonstrate
that a relatively small amount of funding for research-based
assessment paid big dividends, not only in terms of more nuanced
assessment results, but also in terms of professional development and
scholarship.

How We Build Professionalization and Inclusion: Faculty Improvements

As we have begun to assess the program, we have also initiated some
substantive revisions to our curriculum, bringing more consistency
across individual sections of our courses and institutionalizing best
practices. We have made a point of including SLs in this program
development work as a means of getting buy-in from our course
instructors and as a way to tap into their considerable expertise and
enthusiasm. For example, in 2011, the WPA chaired a committee to
redesign our Basic Writing course to better prepare students for
rhetorical instruction and academic research, and to encourage
help-seeking and reflective behaviors. The committee was comprised of
the WPA, a co-chair of our assessment committee, one additional
full-time faculty member, and two contingent faculty. Committee
members were compensated for their time working on the Redesign
Committee through a grant our department chair and WPA secured from
the university’s First-Year Experience Committee. Our Redesign
Committee researched Basic Writing curricula over the summer of 2012,
developed a new curriculum that was shaped primarily by the Framework
for Success in Postsecondary Writing (CWPA,
NCTE, and NWP), piloted
the course in fall 2012, and assessed this curriculum during the
spring semester of 2013 to make additional revisions to the course
before rolling it out officially in fall 2013.

Because
the old Basic Writing curriculum was never assessed, we have no
baseline assessment to use as a comparison. However, institutional
data suggest the new curriculum is working. Prior to the redesign,
70% of Basic Writing students earned grades of 3.0 or above in their
Composition I classes, but after the redesign that number jumped to
90%. More importantly, we think, prior to the redesign, our Basic
Writing faculty worked primarily in isolation from one another, never
knowing if their instruction had any impact on their students. After
the redesign, our Basic Writing faculty have a community of
instructors they can turn to for support and advice, but they also
have access to assessment data that illustrates where the program
needs to focus its efforts and institutional data that suggest “we
know” something about how our Basic Writing students learn to
write. We will continue to develop, assess, and refine this course,
but the Basic Writing Redesign Committee has also begun sharing their
work with a wider community. This spring, the committee presented on
their work at the 2014 Conference on College Composition and
Communication [CCCC]. They also recently had a chapter describing the
redesign accepted for publication in a forthcoming edited collection.
These are, we hope, only the first of many efforts this committee
will undertake to add their voices to the national conversation about
Basic Writing.

Following
this course redesign model, in the summer of 2013 the WPA constituted
a committee to redesign the curriculum of our Composition I course, a
course that lacked a unified approach because it has been transformed
a number of times over the last few years to make room for a variety
of departmental and university initiatives. This new course redesign
committee, chaired by the WPA and including contingent and full-time
faculty, spent the summer of 2013 researching rhetorical approaches
to this course and designing a new curriculum to pilot and assess
during the next academic year. The assessment committee, with help
from full-time and contingent faculty, is now in the process of
assessing the previous Composition I curriculum and the redesigned
curriculum to compare the two approaches. And both committees will
collaborate on professional development workshops and presentations,
introducing the new curriculum to our colleagues in the program and
to national audiences.

Including
contingent faculty in the work of researching, designing, piloting,
and assessing current and new curricular approaches has been
essential for our program for a number of reasons. First, such
inclusion allows for more faculty participation in decision-making.
Specifically,
the approach toward investigating and implementing the course
redesign was not seen as a “top down” mandate that would have led
to resistance. The SLs on the redesign committee serve as ambassadors
while also facilitating faculty professional development meetings.
Such inclusion of our SL faculty made the redesign transparent and
open to additional input. Hallway discussion became useful for
informal feedback, as concerns that some instructors felt hesitant to
say in front of full-time faculty were conveyed to the redesign
committee via SLs. In these small ways, SLs who were not directly
involved in the committee had the opportunity to express their views.

As well, these curricular revisions have served as a means to further
professionalize our faculty, introducing them to current research and
best practices and encouraging them to participate in meaning-making
within the field (Lamos 55). Finally, because we actively pursue a
variety of opportunities to make visible our contingent faculty’s
contributions to program development through presentations,
publications, and reports, we are better able to articulate the value
of the work they do in the first-year writing program and to
highlight the considerable expertise that all of our faculty bring to
this endeavor.

Unfortunately,
faculty development, research, and service are rarely included in the
job descriptions of our part-time colleagues and are only very rarely
compensated. So while our department sought to include our contingent
faculty in assessment and program development work, to tap into the
considerable professional experience and expertise of the majority of
our faculty in the department, we also had to acquire additional
funding to compensate our colleagues for their time and service. Over
the years we have been able to secure funding through a number of
internal grant proposals to the provost, the university’s general
education committee, an ad hoc retention committee, the dean’s
office, and the office of the president. These grants ranged from
$5,000 for smaller projects to $10,000 for major curriculum
overhauls, paying participants $200-$2,000 per project, depending
on their time investment.

New Faculty Designations

As we discuss above, retention and course development funds from the
university have provided us with the means to compensate some of our
contingent faculty for their time, but the department also tapped
into a “special pay” budget line to compensate additional faculty
for work on special committees and on special department and
university initiatives. We did this through the development of new,
unofficial, faculty lines. These lines are considered unofficial
because they are not recognized in the faculty union contract, but
they are essentially the standard Special Lecturer lines—a two-year
contract, some medical benefits, and a guaranteed 4-course load every
year—with some added benefits, including an opportunity to teach
more courses with us and a small stipend for service. These new
enhanced Special Lecturer positions were designed to provide some of
our faculty with a greater sense of job security and to help them to
foster deeper connections to the program, department, and university.
Special Lecturers who applied for these 4/4/1 positions agree to
Monday-Wednesday-Friday and Tuesday-Thursday teaching schedules,
agree to spend four days on campus every week (allowing for some
online class meetings), and are paid a stipend for performing service
for the department (presenting at professional development meetings,
judging Writing Excellence Award essays, implementing campus Writing
Marathons, and working with other units on campus including
orientation, Disability Support Services, and the University
Retention Committee).

In exchange, these contingent faculty receive additional resources to
support their work, including guaranteed 4/4 course loads, a
guaranteed summer course, a $1,000 stipend to cover their work on
various committees or on various department or university
initiatives, and an iPad 2 to aid their instruction and service work.
We have also sought to support these contingent faculty members’
research and teaching by providing some department funding for our
SLs to present their research at regional and national
conferences—CCCC, Michigan’s Lilly Conference on College and
University Teaching and Learning, and the annual Teaching and
Learning Conference co-sponsored by Oakland University and the
University of Windsor—or to attend pedagogical workshops like
Michigan State University’s Writing in Digital Environments and
Ohio State’s Digital Media in Composition Institute.

We have expanded this 4/4/1 Special Lecturer program to offer more of
these positions for our faculty who wish for better job security and
a more significant connection to the program, department, and
discipline; however, the number of positions that we are able to
offer is dependent on enrollment and on the amount of incentive
funding we receive for offering off-campus courses. We currently have
twelve SLs in this position teaching approximately 50% of the
first-year writing courses. Each SL who applies for this position
undergoes an interview process and must maintain superior teaching
evaluations and high campus visibility. Because of the high demand
placed on these instructors, these faculty are encouraged to commit
to teaching only at OU.

Professional Development and Contract Review Procedures

While
we worked to improve the working conditions for all of our program
faculty, we also instituted additional professional development,
developed additional resources for faculty, and initiated new faculty
review procedures.

In
2010 we transformed our four annual staff meetings, which typically
covered policy and procedural issues, into professional development
meetings. Topics for these meetings have addressed specific program
needs, and the majority of our meetings are facilitated by SLs with
expertise in these areas: writing more effective and thorough
assignment descriptions; teaching process from invention to revision;
teaching effective secondary research skills such as incorporation,
analysis, and synthesis of sources; introducing some primary research
into students’ research project requirements; designing more
effective peer reviews; and conferencing with students outside of
class.

The
department has an online space where faculty can post teaching
resources, including professional development handouts, national
position statements, and current research about teaching first-year
writing. Faculty also post their first-year-writing syllabi to this
space at the beginning of every semester, and individual sections of
our eSpace are devoted to different aspects of the program and
department: links to electronic classroom resources such as wiki
servers and software, an electronic archive for course syllabi, and
handouts and resources from our professional development meetings.

While
our first-year program has always provided professional development
activities and resources for faculty, we have only recently begun
formalizing our contract review procedures for contingent faculty.
Every fall, new faculty in the program undergo informal training with
the WPA, and their teaching is observed and documented during their
first semester. The WPA and AWPA review all first-year writing course
syllabi before the start of every semester, and course evaluations
are reviewed by the department chair, WPA, and AWPA at the end of
every semester. Faculty whose course syllabi and evaluations suggest
their pedagogy is not in line with our program objectives meet with
the WPA and AWPA to discuss ways to improve their teaching to better
reach our program outcomes.

Faculty
who are up for a renewal of their two-year contracts develop teaching
portfolios in the second year of their contracts. These portfolios
contain

at least one classroom observation conducted by the WPA or AWPA,

the WPA’s description of the quantitative and qualitative pieces of
the Special Lecturer’s course evaluations compared to the
department averages for each course they teach,

a summary of the Special Lecturer’s course GPA compared to
department averages,

a letter written by the Special Lecturer discussing his/her
professional development and teaching over the previous two years,

a curriculum vitae, and

sample course syllabi.

These
portfolios are evaluated by the department’s Faculty Review
Committee (comprised of all tenured and job-secure faculty), which
advises the chair regarding the renewal or release of the Special
Lecturer’s contract. While the FRC advises the chair in these
reappointment decisions, it is the dean of the College of Arts and
Sciences who makes the final decisions about both hiring and
non-renewal of contingent faculty.

In the section that follows, we reflect on the program-wide culture that
has emerged from our dual focus on evidence-based practice and
faculty development, examining some of the expected and unexpected
benefits of including part-time faculty in the research, assessment,
and development of the courses they teach.

How We Are Creating a Program-Wide Climate of Research

As the material described in the previous sections has indicated,
through assessment, program development, and professional development
we have strived to construct a program grounded in evidence-based
practices. As part of this effort, in the last five years, we have
worked to create a program-wide climate of research so that all of
our faculty can build and share knowledge with each other. Creating a
program-wide climate of research is also in line with principles from
the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, a broader movement in
higher education that seeks to recognize that teaching is scholarly
work and to encourage faculty to conduct research on their own
pedagogical practices (Hutchings, Huber, and Ciccone). A program-wide
climate of research further aids us in making the shift from “I
think” and lore-based, individual understandings to “we know”
and collaborative, research-supported understandings. This process
helps our contingent faculty legitimize, question, and support their
growing knowledge while encouraging them to participate directly in
the making of new knowledge that is of benefit to their teaching, our
program, and our field. This section describes several of the ways
that we are developing this climate, including through our spring
conference, textbook publishing, the formation of research teams, and
the dissemination of knowledge from the program.

One way that we are creating a climate of research is by organizing a
biennial spring conference where all faculty have the opportunity to
propose and present workshops. After our spring term has concluded,
our faculty meet for a full day of FYW-centered professional
development. Previously, our full-time faculty would develop and lead
the event through discussions and presentations each year. Two years
ago, we instead offered the first Spring Conference, which functions
more like a professional conference than a departmental professional
development day. Special Lecturers were encouraged to submit
proposals for workshops and panels; their proposals were blind
reviewed and selected by our first-year writing committee. The first
Spring Conference was a great success with our contingent faculty
taking the lead in providing research-based professional development,
and we held our second conference this year. The Spring Conference
works to recognize our contingent faculty as writing studies scholars
and to provide excellent low-stakes presentation experiences (see
Appendix).

Another
way that we are encouraging a research climate and recognizing the
authority of our contingent instructors is through the production of
Grizz Writes: A Guide to First-Year Writing at Oakland University,
our new textbook for first-year writing. Rather than selecting essays
written from the broader field and creating a custom reader, we chose
to draw upon the expertise of our own faculty by developing our FYW
textbook and publishing our faculty’s original works for use in our
program. Using the proposal and blind review process we developed for
the Spring Conference, the first-year writing committee distributed a
call for chapter proposals that would emphasize our program’s
goals. The production of this textbook accomplishes several key
objectives. First, it draws upon local knowledge and local approaches
to the process of learning to write. Second, the Grizz Writes
publication process recognizes the expertise of our SLs and provides
them with an opportunity for professional development through the
drafting and chapter revision process.{4}
While we have kept the cost low for students, proceeds from the sale
of Grizz Writes
also support our research climate by providing funds for SLs to
travel to professional conferences and for two new departmental
awards given to SLs for teaching excellence and for developing
innovative assignments. In the case of both the Spring Conference and
Grizz Writes,
we are providing our part-time faculty with entry points into the
professional activities surrounding writing studies scholarship, but
doing so in a way that has lower stakes and more firm support
structures than they would find in the broader field. Furthermore,
Grizz Writes
has become a cornerstone of our conversations at professional
development events; at our most recent Spring Conference, several
panels and informal workshops included discussions of how faculty
were using their colleagues’ chapters from Grizz Writes.

Another
way that we are nurturing a climate of research is through the
formation of research teams that study various aspects of teaching
and learning to write. These research teams, consisting of both
full-time and SL instructors, meet regularly and choose an area of
focus to engage in evidence-based study. This process helps shift our
contingent faculty from a passive, lore-based role to an active,
knowledge-producing role, where they can become leaders in our
efforts to better understand aspects of our practice at a program
level and can contribute to broader conversations. Our first research
team spent a year piloting a Writing-About-Writing (WAW) curriculum
(first described by Downs and Wardle) and connected that work to a
larger multi-institutional project that was studying the transfer of
learning as a part of the Elon University research seminar on
“Critical
Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer.” During
that year, both full-time and contingent faculty members contributed
to methodological and pedagogical discussions on teaching WAW
approaches, asking students to engage in reflection and
metacognition, and discovering how to measure our success. Stemming
from the success of our WAW research team, a second team is currently
focusing on instructors’ responses to student writing. A group of
thirteen faculty members meets monthly to discuss their approaches to
providing feedback, to conduct research on how instructors throughout
our program respond to student writing, and to determine
how students incorporate their instructors’ suggestions into their
revisions.

Our SLs also participate in our assessment processes, which allows them
to learn about research and assessment methods, provides additional
professional development through conversations about norming and
program goals, and gives them an important role in the understanding
the broader picture of our program. When we assessed our Composition
II course, three SLs were part of the team that met to norm and rate
student work. The norming process brought about substantial
conversations about—and resistance to—the idea of reflective
writing. After seeing the variety of reflective writing appearing in
student work, however, some of those who were initially resistant
became champions for reflective writing in FYW. This experience
allowed them to deepen their own understanding of student writing on
the macro-level, to understand and help enact change broadly in our
program, and to share their knowledge and experiences with others.
Several SLs participating in various assessments in this past year,
including in our Basic Writing and Composition I redesign
assessments, suggested that all of our SLs should participate in such
a process.

A final way we promote a research-based culture is by encouraging our
SLs to participate in the broader research community of writing
studies. The WAW research team produced several outcomes worth noting
that went beyond the practices we took back into our classrooms.
First, we produced a panel of original research focused on WAW and
reflective writing that was presented by three SLs at CCCC 2013. In
addition, we proposed and received an internal grant for running a
day-long professional development workshop on teaching reflective
writing prior to the start of our fall term. This workshop was led by
four SLs and one full-time faculty member. At CCCC 2014 in
Indianapolis, our Basic Writing Redesign Committee presented on the
research informing their curriculum development project and on the
outcomes from their first assessment of our newly designed Basic
Writing course. Our Response Research Group presented the results of
their research examining best practices in responding to student
papers. Because we have worked hard to build professional development
opportunities through research—and to support those opportunities
with funding—our SLs have become successful writing studies
researchers. They have attended or presented at regional, national,
and international conferences. Workshops, presentations, and research
projects and conference experiences like these have empowered a good
number of our Special Lecturers, who have set an example for other
contingent faculty in our department and who help us to promote
teaching with evidence-supported best practices.

These
efforts to create a program-wide research culture serve several
critical functions. By situating our own practices in the research of
our program and the support of our faculty, we can empower faculty to
better understand their own classroom practices through research.
Through this process, SLs also understand how those practices might
build into larger projects that give our program, and our field,
greater insights into teaching and learning. By recognizing that our
SL faculty have expertise, and asking them to provide that expertise,
we build a stronger program and work to diminish the perceived
distance between contingent and full-time faculty.

What We Wish We Had Known Earlier

There
are, of course, a number of things we wish we had known and done
earlier in terms of developing our first-year program through
evidence-based practices. First, none of us anticipated how much we
would come to rely on our contingent faculty’s knowledge and
growing expertise in the teaching of writing. When a new SL asks one
of us a question about service learning, new media composition,
primary research, copyright, or plagiarism, we are now able to direct
them to the department’s experts on these topics: our SLs who have
done the research and applied what they have learned from that
research to their own teaching.

While
this is obviously a positive development, there are a couple of
things that we should have done differently. For example, we wish we
had engaged the entire program in an assessment of all of our
first-year writing classes before we began making changes to those
courses
as soon as we became an independent department.
In addition to providing us with a clearer record of where we were
before we redesigned these courses, a thorough program assessment
would have given us more opportunities
for conversations with our faculty about what roles they felt each
course should play in our course sequence. Taking
the time to assess the entire existing FYW curriculum first would
have given us more time to reflect on and prepare for the changes we
wanted to implement. It might also have prevented our hard-working
FYW instructors from feeling overwhelmed by changes occurring
simultaneously on a number of fronts at once: new curricular goals,
new retention and first-year experience initiatives embedded in FYW
courses, and a new department structure.

Finally,
given the amount of research our SLs are currently engaging in—both
informally through their participation in the Invitational Summer
Institutes offered by OU’s site of the National Writing Project and
formally through IRB-approved projects—we wish we had designed some
optional professional development workshops introducing classroom
research methods, IRB approval processes, and conference proposal
writing to our entire faculty. In our enthusiasm, we may have
underestimated the difficulties and challenges that some of our
colleagues would encounter when they took on the role of researchers.
Although we have provided informal mentoring of SL colleagues through
this process, more formal training would have benefited all faculty
involved.

Conclusion: We Used to “Think,” But Now We “Know”

The opening lines of this profile illustrate the kinds of challenges many
first-year writing programs face: instructors too often base their
classroom practices on what they “think” is best for their
students because they are unaware of or resistant to
research-supported evidence to the contrary. Over the last five
years, our program has sought multiple ways to
address those challenges by embracing evidence-based practices as a
part of our ongoing program development. As
a result, the story we told to open this article is now the exception
rather than the rule at OU. We conclude this program profile by
highlighting just one of the positive ways a colleague’s research
has impacted our entire program.

One Special Lecturer’s Story

Over the years a significant number of our SLs have enrolled in the
Invitational Summer Institute hosted by our local site of the
National Writing Project. The summer institute provides our faculty
and area teachers with an opportunity to research and develop a
project related to the teaching of writing. One of our SLs, Cornelia
Pokrzywa, who was concerned that the university had just cancelled
its subscription to Turnitin.com because of a lack of use, decided to
research plagiarism during the institute. She began her research
believing that Turnitin.com was a valuable pedagogical tool, but she
revised this position over the course of the summer as she researched
the issue of plagiarism in general and the use of online tools to
identify plagiarism in particular. Pokrzywa reflected on these
experiences recently:

At the time, I was one of a few instructors using Turnitin.com. I felt I
was using it responsibly, and I had students submit their own work so
everything was in the open. I had a number of students who
self-corrected unintentional plagiarism in draft stages, but I also
had some who just let it go and those were the ones who faced the
dean [of students] at the end of the semester. When OU canceled the
subscription, I was unhappy. I felt Turnitin was a tool to manage
work in an increasingly digital environment. [...]

I undertook research on plagiarism with the intent of requesting a
department license or at least an individual license. [... But]
drawing heavily on the work of Rebecca Moore Howard, [I] concluded
that patch writing and “plagiarism” was more about the assignment
parameters and insufficient scaffolding than student shortcomings. [.
. .] To this day, I still find that faculty have widely varied
definitions of common knowledge. As a result, the research
demonstrates that students are often unclear about citation
requirements. I do teach students to be proactive; they must take an
audience-centered approach and determine common knowledge for every
writing context to avoid questions of authorship. While this
complicates the definition, the research suggests that it better
prepares them for the complex demands of college writing. [...]

One final outcome of the research: I never take any instance of
plagiarism as a personal affront. When students take language from a
source without attribution, it may be an error or it may be a
shortcut for them, but it’s clearly never about their desire to
cheat me in any way. The research experience allowed me to look at
this objectively, and I think many writing instructors aren’t able
to do that.

After
four weeks of research—examining position statements by the
CCCC-Intellectual Property Caucus and the Council of Writing Program
Administrators, and synthesizing research and theory regarding
plagiarism in writing courses—Pokrzywa moved from “I think” to
“we know” and modified her position on Turnitin.com dramatically
(while still maintaining a sense of nuance in her own position).
Since that time, she has developed professional development modules
around plagiarism, new media, and detection tools, and she is now
considered the department’s expert on plagiarism, common knowledge,
and copyright/fair use. Pokrzywa has expanded what each of us in the
writing program can now claim to know about this complex topic. And
the only thing our program needed to do was provide this motivated
instructor with the resources she needed to develop new knowledge on
this subject.

In
conclusion, what we have learned from creating an inclusive model for
research and professional development is that many of our contingent
faculty members are eager for participation in program development
and pedagogical research. They are also more willing to buy-in to
program development if they feel invested in the work they are doing
and are offered opportunities to engage in meaningful research that
contributes to our writing program’s policies and curriculum and
that helps all of us to improve our own classroom practices. This
strengthens our program and encourages all of us to use more
evidence-supported practices in our classrooms and curricular
decision-making.
By shifting our department culture from “I think” to “we know,”
we are also modeling the values we seek to instill in our students:
sustained inquiry, active collaboration, critical analysis, and a
rhetorical approach to writing. These evidence-based practices are
the source of our ethos both as individual faculty members and as a
program.

Student Website Production: An Open Space for Conversation with a
More Global Audience
Marilyn Borner

2:35-3:00: Closing General Session

Notes

Institutional lore and other profiles and histories of Oakland University suggest that the university was originally designed to be the honors college of Michigan State University, but in an article that is currently under review, our colleagues Felicia Chong and Jim Nugent refute this commonly accepted historical claim. (Return to text.)

For additional information about the history of Oakland University’s first-year writing curriculum and major, see Wallis Andersen’s chapter in What We Are Becoming; additional information about the formation of the new department and major is also detailed in Lori Ostergaard and Greg Giberson’s program profile in this journal. (Return to text.)

See Elizabeth G. Allan and Dana Lynn Driscoll’s article in Assessing Writing for a discussion of the findings from this research-based assessment study of our Composition II course. (Return to text.)

Special Lecturers whose chapters are published in Grizz Writes receive a small stipend for their contributions. Grizz Writes is not our department’s first collaboration between full-time faculty and SLs. Our colleague Alice Horning has published two edited collections featuring chapters composed by our Special Lecturers, Revision: History, Theory, and Practice and Reconnecting Reading and Writing. (Return to text.)

Conference on College Composition and Communication [CCCC] Committee on Assessment. Writing Assessment: A Position Statement. Mar. 2009. Web. 11 July 2013.

Council of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English, National Writing Project [CWPA, NCTE, and NWP]. Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. CWPA, NCTE, and NWP, 2011. Web. 1 July 2012.

Wang, Xueli, and Sarah Hurley. Assessment as a Scholarly Activity?: Faculty Perceptions of and Willingness to Engage in Student Learning Assessment.Journal of General Education 61.1 (2012): 1-15. Web. 11 July 2013.

Wardle, Elizabeth. Intractable Writing Program Problems, Kairos, and Writing about Writing: A Profile of the University of Central Florida’s First-Year Composition Program.Composition Forum 27 (2013). Web. 11 July 2013.